newb buyers

[Iron Draggon]

I just got my perfect positive feedback record tarnished with one neutral from a newb buyer who clearly didn't read the full description of my auction, or the payment options that I was willing to accept. First, he emails me and wants to know what my address is, so he can send my payment. I replied with my Paypal email address, since the auction clearly stated that I only accept Paypal. A few days go by, and I decide that I might as well try to be nice about it, or I'll never get paid and I'll end up with a negative, so I reply again and tell him that I'll accept a money order, but it has to be a USPS postal money order. I also politely tell him to please read the payment options next time. A few more days go by, and his money order arrives.

Not a USPS money order like I requested, so I had to go to my bank to cash it instead of going to the post office. This guy clearly failed all tests regarding his ability to follow directions while he was in school. I ship the item and fully expect to either have it returned to me with a request for a full refund, including what it cost him to ship it back to me, or to have an even bigger problem over it and have him claim that he never received it. Fortunately, neither one of those things happened, but this is how he thanks me for putting up with all his BS when he leaves his feedback for me on ebay:

Neutral: Thank you, but the card wasn't in mint condition.

The auction clearly stated that the card had 3 creases across the top, but was otherwise in mint condition. I really don't think that it was misleading.

So I replied with an equally ambivalent comment of my own in my profile:

Reply by irondraggon: You're welcome, the auction clearly stated there were 3 creases across the top.

I'm glad that I chose to wait until he left feedback for me, before I left any feedback for him. Normally, I'll leave positive feedback immediately upon receipt of payment, but in this case I had a bad feeling about the whole transaction, so I decided that I would wait and see what he said about me. So, tit for tat, he leaves a neutral for me, so he gets a neutral from me. I almost went ahead and left a neutral for him before he left any feedback for me anyway, so it wasn't exactly revenge. I was thinking about it anyway.

Neutral: Obviously didn't read the full description of the auction or the payment options.

Take that, you annoying little 18 feedback newb, #19 was your first neutral, and if you keep on putting other sellers through the same kinda crap that you put me through, you're gonna end up with your first negative soon.

This is the reason why I was reluctant to start selling on ebay with the same account that I've been using to buy on ebay for the past 4 years. Those darn newb buyers are the bane of every seller's existence. Just one newb bidder obviously doesn't read most of my listing, which was quite brief, and my perfect positive feedback record is forever tarnished with a neutral now.

I know it's not that big a deal, because at least he didn't leave me with my first negative, but it's the principal of the thing. I don't think that all these newb bidders should even be allowed to leave feedback until they've done at least 50 transactions. Or at least, I should have the option as the seller to either refuse or accept it, before it appears on my record. A crazy idea, I know, but it pisses me off. I didn't deserve that neutral, and he knows it.

[-hellvin-]

Yes. I hate idiot buyers. I would love to have the chance to "personally" deliver the item to their house then beat them to death with a lead pipe. But fantasy aside, all you can really do is just take it. Idiots will be idiots. Right now I have a guy who filed a claim against me on paypal that I never sent his items and he did NOT CONTACT ME AT ALL IN ANY WAY FIRST or after I sent him an email with paypal bitching me out to send proof. Now I gotta go to post ship to somehow get a receipt because they don't have any kind of tracking/delivery conf. for usps.

[dj898]

i'd leave negative feedback and block the idiot from ever bidding on my auction. also if anyone with no positive feedback I'll cancel the bid for them - how kind of me :p - and let them know without first contacting me they are not gonna bidding on my auctions

cheers

[tholly]

i hate idiots like that....personally i would have left a negative.....he deserved it

[suppafly]

You shoul´dve left him a negative, for being an idiot

[captain nintendo]

Well at least he paid :o

And its not a negative that he left you. :o :o

[rpepper9]

OMG! I don't think feedback is very important at all. I leave feedback when the item is paid for and that is that. I really don't think feedback is a very good determining factor. When bidding I never look at the sellers feedback first. In the 3 or 4 years that I have been on eBay I have only been screwed out of 2 items, and they were each under 5.00.

I have over 600 feedbacks and that includes about 3 neutrals and about 2 negitives. Yet my eBay selling goes on without a hitch. Stop complaining about a neutral. I think that it looks worse and shows what kind of seller you are when you flame someone back and get into a negitive feedback war. If you think about it the items are not going to be visiable for long, and the feedback will soon disapear to page 2 and then 3 and so on. I really don't think it is that bid of a deal and has very little to do with what I bid on.

It is also very cheap to cancel bids of people who have low feedback. Think about the times when we all had low feedback. It takes time to build it up, and even longer when sellers with a stick up there ass keeps cancelling all the bids.! x_x

[Cmosfm]

I've had the same problem, almost.

Well, I had a woman once who couldn't pay via paypal like I made perfectly clear. So after about a week of trying to get ahold of her, I told her she could send a money order. She did....

....2 weeks later....

....Yeah, it took her TWO WEEKS to take a money order to the post office. I left her a neutral, and she did the same for me.

Still pissed off about that. :o

[Iron Draggon]

I know it's not that big a deal, but feedback is that important to some people, and it's those people that make me worry about this kind of thing. There are sellers who won't sell to you if you have *any* negatives, and there are even sellers who won't sell to you if you have *any* neutrals, and these tend to be the sellers who have all the OMG-I-Can't-Believe-He-Really-Has-One! items. It doesn't matter to them if you've done 1000 transactions and only one went bad, they're too spooked to sell to you, and off they go with your OMG-I'll-Never-Find-Another-One-Again! item. I'm not really worried about what my potential buyers will think of that neutral. Comments like the one from the guy above him that say the item was even better than I had described it will more than make up for all the jerks like that one newb.

I'm just glad that I found a buyer for that particular item. I was wondering why someone was so quick to jump on it, but I figured they must be like me and they open their cars, so the package didn't really matter to them. Most Hot Wheels collectors are very anal about the condition of the package, especially for a Treasure Hunt car like that one, so I can understand the buyer being disappointed if he didn't realize that the package was in slightly less than mint condition because of the 3 creases in it. But it's his own damn fault for not reading the listing thoroughly, just as it's his own damn fault for making me accept a money order when I didn't wanna have to deal with any.

BTW, in a follow-up story to this transaction, this guy must be bad karma all the way around. I made the mistake of depositing his money order in my new bank account, instead of cashing it and then depositing the cash. I didn't know that they treat a money order like a check, and it takes a few days for those funds to become available. I was in a bit of a bind, so I spent the amount of that money order the next day, not knowing that it hadn't posted to my account yet. So I ended up getting a $30 overdraft charge this week because of it. I always make my deposits on Fridays, but somehow something that I did made me come up about $1 short, because I hadn't made this week's deposit yet, and the overdraft occurred on Thursday. So now that bastard has ended up costing me $30 on top of everything else!

I know it's my own fault for not understanding all of my new bank's policies thoroughly, and for spreading myself so thin this month that I went about $1 in the hole for a day, but geez, it was just one day and just $1, and all because of that God forsaken newb and this whole cursed transaction, I'm still feeling the aftershocks of this ebay transaction from hell! I don't know what kind of dark cloud is following that guy around, but there is a very bad aura about him, and I certainly should've cancelled his bid, or at least emailed him to make sure that he was aware of the condition of the packaging on that item! I don't want to be an ass to people just because they're new to ebay. We all have to start somewhere, and most newbs are just nice folks like us who just happen to be just getting started. But it's things like this that make some sellers get really anal about who they will or won't accept bids from on their auctions, and the conditions of letting them bid if they have a low feedback rating like this guy did. That's why I'm wondering what my own policies should be now, and how I'm gonna handle stuff like this in the future. But one thing's for sure, the next time I get a money order, I'm cashing it at my bank and then depositing the money, not just depositing the money order thinking that it's the same as cash, like they told me it was!

I can't believe that so many things went wrong with this transaction. Is it like a rule that your very first ebay sale ever has to go all haywire on you? I'm very disappointed that all this went down on my very first sale using my own account. It's like a bad omen. I had sold a bunch of stuff using my sister's account last year, and now I see why she got tired of selling and didn't want to let me sell stuff on her account anymore. She said that it just became a nightmare for her, and now I can see why. But I am determined, so don't worry, I'm not gonna let this whole thing put me off of selling for good. I just wanted to vent about it because it pissed me off, and I know there's a bunch of you here who know exactly what I'm talking about. I am very detailed about my Hot Wheels listings, because I know how Hot Wheels collectors are. I will be just as detailed about my game listings because I know how game collectors are. But what pisses me off is when you go to all that trouble and spend all that time on just one listing, trying to make sure that there won't be any possible misunderstandings over any perceived misrepresentations of the item, and something still goes wrong anyway!

Sorry for the length of this post. I didn't mean to start ranting again, but I'm even more pissed off about the $30 that this transaction ended up costing me now, and I'll be very glad when it does finally stop being visible and gets pushed back so far in my records that no one will ever go back that far to see what happened. But I still don't think that I deserved it, even if it is just a neutral. However, I don't feel that's reason enough to convince myself that this guy deserved a negative for what he put me through. That would be revenge for sure, and I'm just not that much of a vengeful person. So I'll just chalk it all up to experience and go on my way now. Thanks for listening.